


I've Gone To Look For America

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: American History, Arguing, Gen, Graffiti, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:12:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: They had seen so much of America and still there were things like this, moments that struck a sudden chord in his soul.  Truths half-hidden in plain sight.  Signs and wonders.





	I've Gone To Look For America

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: Season 6  
> A/N: Honestly, I can't believe I'd never written a fic with a title like this before. Thanks, Simon & Garfunkel. That song is one of the greats.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

They were in the car. Going somewhere, going nowhere: Mulder wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. It was one literal pile of shit after the other. Keeping the nation safe, one manure sample at a time. 

Scully was driving. She liked to drive and he’d never used to let her, but there was no thrill to the chase. The occasional farmer didn’t take kindly to the feds rolling in in a cloud of dust, but it wasn’t like the farms themselves could crawl across the landscape, ponderous and weighty, rows of cattle corn ruffling like plumage. Mulder sprawled in the passenger seat and flipped through the file again. They were driving past a town, clipping the outskirts. There was a dingy gas station, glimpsed through a scrawny stand of trees as they sped past, a half-empty strip mall, a high school with the lights of the football stadium already on even though it was only 4 and the sunshine lay over the fields like molten gold glass.

The car whipped across the plains toward one of the overpasses that just let the locals ease over the interstate’s indifferent drivers. Mulder glanced up from the file. There was a tag on the concrete, spray paint with grey matte slopped over it in a rough rectangle. He could still make out the words. 

_America died with JFK._

The file folder slithered off his lap as he sat up, twisting around as if he would be able to see it on the other side of the overpass. He kept looking even as the shabby little bridge faded out of sight. They had seen so much of America and still there were things like this, moments that struck a sudden chord in his soul. Truths half-hidden in plain sight. Signs and wonders. 

“Hmm?” Scully asked.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“The overpass?” she said. “I saw it.”

“The graffiti,” he said. “America died with JFK.” It sent a shiver down his spine to say it. Camelot. America’s golden boy, America’s golden age, as patriotic as a high school football game on a hot September night. All of it had ended that day in Dallas. He had been three. Of course he had never known the American dream. It had already been deferred, shriveling in the sun, by the time he’d reached the age to understand.

Scully scoffed, a tiny little noise he could barely hear over the shush of the air conditioner. 

“What?” he asked.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” she said. “America died with JFK. It sounds romantic, but to discount the progress we’ve made since the 1960s seems disingenuous at best. He died before the Civil Rights Act even passed. We’ve had four Constitutional amendments since then. I can’t even count the number of important Supreme Court decisions have been handed down that have, in some fundamental way, altered the character and the workings of the nation.”

“You sound like a tour guide at the Capitol,” he muttered. “You can’t deny that something fundamentally changed about America when JFK died. Some social structure collapsed, or people became afraid. It wasn’t the same country it had been before.”

“I was still in utero,” she said dryly. “I suppose I’ve only lived in the ghost of America, by your reckoning.”

“The way people talked about it,” he said. “He was the heart of a nation.”

“I’ve heard,” she said, glancing at him and then back to the road. She twisted the control for the headlights, as if she didn’t turn them on every time she got into the car (”It’s safer,” she always insisted). “Mulder, we hadn’t even been to the moon in 1963. We hadn’t been through Vietnam, or the AIDS crisis, or the entire decade of the 80s.”

“Have we even actually been to the moon?” he asked, just to see her scowl. “Doesn’t it feel true, Scully, somewhere in your heart? Doesn’t it feel like the American dream slips through our fingers a little more every year? That town we passed a few miles back - what do you want to bet it’s another short sad story of empty Main Streets and urban flight?”

“America has always been more of a process than a dream,” she said. “And to idolize the past is to ignore that the very founding of the nation was predicated on acts of violence, both for those who fled here and for those who lived here when the Pilgrims and the conquistadors and all the rest came to colonize. The roots of America are inextricably intertwined with genocide and slavery, not to mention the subjugation of women and a staggering disregard for general social welfare. Whatever you think of Kennedy, he was part of that too.”

“We all are,” he snapped, and then subsided. “Sorry, Scully.”

“I know you want to believe,” she said softly. “In the supernatural. In extraterrestrials. In America, despite everything we’ve seen the government do and conceal. But Mulder, we have to make our own golden age, and I can’t believe it’s already happened. I can’t believe that was the best that we can be. Surely there’s some better, kinder, more equitable nation that we can build together, one that’s cognizant of the mistakes of the past and mindful of the potential of the future.”

“Now who’s the romantic?” he said.

She smiled and put on the blinker. “We need gas and I want to stretch my legs.”

“Buy you dinner?” he asked, pulling out his wallet and brandishing the Bureau card.

“Only if there’s a slice of apple pie involved,” she said. 

“A real American,” he said admiringly as Scully eased the car down the exit ramp, the susurration of the tires fading from highway whine to in-town purr, punctuated by the rattle of a pothole. “Sometimes I think you’re the only true patriot, Scully.”

She laughed. “Sometimes I do too,” she said, and the setting sun cut out her profile like a newly minted coin.


End file.
